Medical mission trip participants
About 30 volunteers spent one week in Nicaragua recently on a medical mission trip through Amigos for Christ. The contingent included eight Atrium Medical Center employees:
Dr. Dan Butler, surgery
Emily Griggs, surgical technician
Kate Kusneske, phlebotomist
Dr. David Miller, surgery
Shelley Shade, surgical technician
Joe Solomon, certified registered nurse anesthetist
Monica Treta, registered nurse
Dr. Scott True, surgery
SOURCE: Atrium Medical Center
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Some people travel long distances to continue their education.
These eight medical professionals — with all due respect to the Cincinnati Reds of the 1970s, these truly are the “Great Eight” — have taken a lifetime of learning, and probably have the college debt as proof.
But what they learned during a weeklong medical mission trip to Nicaragua, as part of Amigos for Christ, can’t be taught in a classroom.
Call it “Life Lesson 101.”
It started with a two-hour, 2,500-foot grueling climb up a volcano called Cerro Negro, which means “black hill,” as part of a team building exercise and ended back home with their most appreciated hot shower and night’s sleep in their beds. In between, the team from Atrium Medical Center performed 62 surgeries in four days, including those for gall bladders, kidney stones and prostates and repaired a few broken bones, too.
It was a season of “M*A*S*H” in less than a week.
And all this while working in a 100-bed medical facility where a few of the four air conditioners worked, the overflow patients laid in the hallways, IV poles hung from nails on the wall, cockroaches crawled in the corner and flies circled overhead.
They worked 11- and 12-hour days, and every morning, were awakened by another cold shower. They said there are two temperatures in Nicaragua, hot and hotter, and two seasons, dry and wet.
Sounds like hell, right?
“No vacation,” Dr. Scott True said.
But don’t be fooled. They had the time of their lives.
As soon as Dr. David Miller, a 22-year surgeon at Middletown Regional Hospital and now Atrium, returned home, he couldn’t wait to look at his 2014 calendar and schedule his next mission trip.
The three surgeons on the mission — Dr. Dan Butler, True and Miller — said everyone paid or raised their own expenses, which included $250 in fees and a $700 airline ticket.
The group also received the support of Atrium Medical Center and Carol Turner, its chief executive officer, the doctors said. The hospital donated thousands of dollars worth of used medical equipment out of its warehouse that was transported in large trucks and carried in 50-pound duffel bags by those on the mission.
They estimated the value of their services and supplies “easily” at $500,000.
Dr. Miller then did one of the MasterCard commercials, where he listed the cost of the trip, how many days they spent in Nicaragua, what was accomplished and ended it with: “Priceless.”
While the AMC contingent performed medical procedures, others on the mission trip dug a 320-foot water line through volcano rock, a chore that continued a few days later when the next missionaries arrived. The doctors never will look at a glass of water the same way again.
“We just turn on the faucet and water comes out here,” Dr. Butler said. “Not there.”
Their water is contaminated, and the natives only survive because of their “hardy” immune systems, Dr. Miller said.
The group also took time to meet some of the natives, those who lives in shacks with wooden walls and dirt floor, homes not fit for our dogs, they said. One elderly woman was boiling a bone in a pot of water over a fire. It was that night’s supper.
They came home exhausted but energized with a proper perspective.
Dr. True said “we all live in a community we take for granted.”
Dr. Butler said the mission trip was “one way to give back.”
Dr. Miller added: “We weren’t over there to change the world, but to make it better for them.”
After a mission trip like this, Dr. Miller said there is something called “re-entry stress.” The medical professionals returned to their lives, while thousands more in Nicaragua needed medical treatment.
It’s a life of way. Over there. And here.
“It’s not that we feel guilty for being born in the U.S.” Dr. Miller said. “We were born here for a reason.”
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